aaronontherun

[aaronontherun]

Oh I've just had the silliest Jayvik idea:

An AU where vampire Viktor gets temporarily stuck in bat form due to a lab accident and Jayce takes it upon himself to look after him/bring Viktor with him anywhere he goes to make sure he's safe, all while having constant cuteness agression because bat Viktor is so tiny and adorable and it's more than his heart can take.

[aaronontherun]

some praise from the machine herald

[aaronontherun]

— You will be death of me...

— I won't let you bury it.

[aaronontherun]

viktor was eaten 😌😌😌

[aaronontherun]

Quick reminder as we head into Trump’s first week in office. We are about to see an onslaught of executive actions designed to strip of us our rights. We’ve seen this before.

Many of them won’t be legal, many of them won’t take effect immediately, and some of them will be just plain nonsense. Trump alone can’t change the law (yet anyway- that’s Congress) and there is an official government process for enacting most executive actions that works slowly.*

There will be time to fight against these orders—either by stopping them entirely, weakening them, or at least slowing them down.

The purpose of doing so many terrible things at once is to scare us. Is to intimidate us to cede more ground than we need to. Don’t let them.

Stay engaged, stay angry, stay hopeful (or spiteful- me tbh), and—most importantly—stay strategic. Find an organization you trust, follow them, and take action when they ask you to.

(Side note- pick just a few issues to care deeply about and only follow a few organizations you trust. Don’t try to solve everything all the time or consume every piece of news. You WILL burn yourself out and that’s not helpful for anyone. Trust me, speaking from experience. Staying 15% engaged is better than 120% for three months and then 0%).

What we’re seeing right now is a backlash to decades of progress—a dying (and by extension dangerous I’m not gonna lie) breath of those in power desperate to maintain control. They wouldn’t be trying to squash us if there wasn’t something to squash.

TL;DR- there’s gonna be a lot of bad stuff in the news today. Don’t give into panic. There will be time to fight most of it. Stay engaged.

*Unfortunately, there will be some actions the President can control on his own and will take effect immediately. ICE Raids being one of them. Here’s a Know Your Rights factsheet. To learn more and stay informed on this issue, recommend following National Immigration Law Center, CASA, Immigrant Defense Project.

[aaronontherun]

hey can you guys watch them for a second i’ll be right back

[aaronontherun]

hey can you guys watch them for a second i’ll be right back

[aaronontherun]

"They're soulmates" oh it's way worse than that

~ quote from marsadist

[aaronontherun]

a familiar face

(i'll be selling prints of this at megacon london this weekend! do drop by table Z3 if you're around)

[aaronontherun]

but you were never broken, viktor. 💔 🩹

SHOP.

[aaronontherun]

This week has been difficult, but this keeps going through my head:

Evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. No matter how well-planned, how foolproof an evil plan, no matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, in the end it will founder on the rocks of iniquity and vanish.

Aziraphale, Good Omens

[aaronontherun]

The Trial

Short thoughts on how Gabriel & Beez could fit back into the story in The Finale & on how Aziraphale's fall would lead to the collapse of the current Heaven/Hell system, in response, as promised, to questions posed by @zenkitty714.

Whoever the guy with the coffee in The Final 15 is, he didn't exactly say that there was a Supreme Archangel job vacancy because Heaven was down for giving Gabriel a watch and telling him to bugger off and go tend to his marigolds. At no point does Our Villain ever actually express one shred of intent to leave Gabriel alone. He simply says that he feels there's a job opening... which all feels a bit sinister since it suggests that there is one because our villains still plan on trying to kill Gabriel.

The Metatron's response to Gabriel mutinying on Monday morning was to try to murder him and we saw exactly nothing in the course of S2 that would indicate that his plans have changed where that is concerned. In order to get Aziraphale into the lift, Our Villain had to lead him to believe that there was a chance-- a remote chance but a chance-- that The Metatron was willing to change and let Heaven reform. Letting it seem like Gabriel and Beez were safe was part of that deception.

Gabriel and Beez were only safe for the brief moment until Aziraphale got into the elevator because our villains needed to pretend like they didn't care about revenge against them in order to sell the idea that Heaven could reform to an understandably doubtful but desperate Aziraphale. Now that they have Aziraphale, though, and have accomplished their goal of going after him first to divide and conquer our main characters, our villains have no need to keep up this charade.

That's why it's a damn good thing that Uriel is on our main characters' side now because she'll be there when Aziraphale falls. She won't be able to stop it without following him to Hell, which wouldn't help either of them or anybody else. What she can do, though, is then be the one to go get Gabriel and Beez and tell them what's happened to Aziraphale. Uriel on the run from Heaven as a result of this and the need to find Crowley will then give them all reason to go to the bookshop, where Muriel will serve her purpose of having witnessed basically all of The Final 15. They'll be able to tell Ineffable Bureaucracy what they missed, with Uriel confirming the bit of what she herself saw before the angels left after following whom they're now realizing was Satan's command to leave.

Wherever Crowley is at the start of The Finale's story in the present, I bet hard that it's going to be Gabriel who goes to get him. It's going to be Gabriel who tells Crowley that the reason why he can't feel Aziraphale anymore isn't because Aziraphale was Book of Life'd-- that's not a real thing. (Notice how the one character who could have answered that question in S2-- Gabriel-- is prevented from even knowing it's a question for the entirety of the season.) It's going to be Gabriel who tells Crowley that he can't feel Aziraphale because Aziraphale fell and Gabriel who talks Crowley off a metaphorical and possibly literal ledge when, at some point, Muriel confirms that Crowley sat there in a chair and told Aziraphale to go alone with a being they all will by then realize was Satan.

What our working-together-on-this-one villains of The Metatron and Satan haven't counted on is that the revolution they're trying to nip in the bud has actually already started. They have overlooked Uriel entirely and didn't anticipate that her response would be to side with Gabriel and help him and Beez over Heaven. They didn't count on Gabriel and Beez helping take care of Crowley. They didn't count on Muriel agreeing to help by giving the bookshop to the revolutionaries. They didn't count that it wouldn't take much for the rebelling angels and demons to get Furfur and his miracle blocking skills involved or Dagon and her Dark Council power on their side.

What our villains really haven't counted on is that Aziraphale is the bridge too far. The angel whose life taught all these other angels and demons how to live is going to be the one to break the system oppressing all of them by having inspired in his own struggles everyone to come together and fight Heaven and Hell for him.

What kind of fight, you say?

One of the Powell & Pressburger films referenced a bunch in S2 and playing on the tv in The Resurrectionist Pub behind Gabriel during the Ineffable Bureaucracy flashback is A Matter of Life and Death and I think a plot like this film is basically where The Finale is headed. You can see it on the tv here as Gabriel does the "Everyday" miracle:

The basic plot of that film centers around a trial where a man who has been outrunning a clerical mistake that caused him to live when he should have died fights to stay alive on Earth to be with the woman he fell in love with. He was a RAF pilot during WW2 whose plane went down. He was supposed to die but a mistake had him live and he fell in love with the air traffic control operator he was talking to on his way down-- the character of June, whose look in the film is the inspiration for Crowley's look in the Before the Beginning scene.

Our hero in the film gets some help from someone who knows how to wrangle Heaven, launch a trial, and who acts as a defense lawyer-- something that I think sounds a lot like a perfect role for Gabriel.

There's also that we now have that we know that Gabriel knows for sure about the body swap in S1 which means he knows that, technically, Aziraphale did get a trial because that's really who Hell put on trial. We had the scene of a drunk Crowley telling Jim this in S2 to show us that Gabriel knows beyond a shadow of doubt that Aziraphale kind of already had a trial so that we can appreciate it when he then lies his ass off to The Metatron for his friends and claims they never gave Aziraphale a trial. 😉

Trials are a big thing in Good Omens' Heaven & Hell and in its finales in both seasons so far... even if they've been sham trials so far... but there's one of our main characters who hasn't gotten one yet, right?

Gabriel's trial was shown in the S2 finale and, back in S1, Hell gave whom they thought was Crowley a trial. However, Heaven never actually gave who they thought was Aziraphale a trial in S1 and they won't before sending him to Hell at the start of The Finale, either.

Gabriel and Beez know how to work the system and I think that they are going to lead an effort to challenge Aziraphale's status as a demon by filing a challenge to it that forces Heaven to give Aziraphale a trial. (Aziraphale is going to insist as this goes on that he goes nowhere without Crowley and it might result in them both being on trial.)

What will really be on trial, though, is the system of Heaven/Hell itself because, if our characters can win the trial, it will mean that they have proven that Heaven isn't infallible in their assessment. That would collapse Heaven and Hell because all the demons would challenge their own statuses and all the angels would realize that Heaven can make mistakes and this is all bullshit, which is likely what happens when all is said and done.

One part of the film is that one of the lawyers also demands a trial by jury with a diverse jury pool to ensure a fair trial, which would be very different from what we've seen happen with the characters in Good Omens so far. It would have to happen in The Finale for this plot to exist.

I think one of the results of the trial is that this group of angels and demons challenging Heaven here wind up demanding that The Metatron produce God and exposing him as a fraud when it's revealed that he can't, actually, because he doesn't speak for God and all of Heaven and Hell is a sham.

Satan figured it out long ago but cut a deal with The Metatron to stay quiet in exchange for having his own kingdom down there in Hell. The two of them are in a bit of a mutually-assured destruction pact where they co-exist to use the threats of one another to control the angels and demons they're oppressing.

When the trial leads to the overthrowing of The Metatron, the demise of Satan might be an actual battle of sorts but the end result is that both of them will be gone by the end and the angels and demons will be set up to form an united, more democratic form of government. The threat of Armageddon will be over, allowing for Crowley and Aziraphale to South Downs Cottage it in peace.

That's how Aziraphale's fall can be the thing that brings down the whole house of cards... as S2 seemed to possibly be suggesting:

[aaronontherun]

I know we all love the bit where Crowley is Bildading Muriel and Aziraphale is overheating from want...

...and it is gold but my favorite bit is actually the look Aziraphale gives Crowley when they exchange glances a few seconds later...

...look at that smile and that little mischievous eyebrow and those sparkling eyes...

[aaronontherun]

So show me that which I cannot see Even if it hurts me Even if I can't sleep

print available

[aaronontherun]

I am Jayce

[aaronontherun]

do it drunk. do it high

[aaronontherun]

Delusional

I believed I could cure it all, for you, dear